Like it or not, as a small business owner, your personal life has the potential to reflect positively or negatively on your business’s perception by potential customers.

However, don’t worry, there are a few quick and easy steps you can take to evaluate and improve your personal branding!

Google Yourself
It sounds simple, but many people don’t have any idea what results appear when their name is entered into a search engine.

Hopefully, if your name isn’t among the most common (sorry John Smith!), you’ll see links to your website or business, with you listed as the owner. If you don’t see any links like this, you may want to check out an earlier post on the Webs SEO Booster.

Build a Positive Personal Brand
Now that you’ve found your personal brand results and ranking, or lack thereof, it’s time to get to work on improving them!

The good news is there are many great resources for easily improving and tracking your personal brand. Start by checking out Brand Yourself, a service that helps achieve these goals.

On the site, you enter all the personal pages you care about “boosting” and the search keywords you want them to rank highly for. The service helps you quickly develop links between various profiles, promote strong content, and identify any potential issues.

Limit Negative and/or Highly Personal Content
Equally as important as building a positive personal brand with services like Brand Yourself is limiting negative or highly personal content that is associated with your name.

The most common issue we see is public photos and posts on Facebook profiles that reflect poorly on an individual, their career, or in this case, their business. It’s worth taking a quick look at 15 of the worst types of Facebook photos, comparing against your own, and making any needed deletions.

Also, if you’d like to maintain a personal profile on Facebook separate from your business, we recommend making the profile completely private with a few simple steps here.

Finally, if you need help building or managing a professional presence on social media for your business or your personal profile, consider using Pagemodo. Pagemodo lets you quickly design professional-looking cover photos, automate your social media posts, and even run contests for your customers.

Monitor Your Personal Brand
Like SEO, Personal Branding should be a constant effort for a small business owner. Consider putting a monthly reminder on your calendar to check your Google rankings and your Brand Yourself profile.

How do you ensure your personal brand supports, and doesn’t interfere with, your small business’s brand? We’d love to hear about any other Personal Branding tools you’ve found useful as well!

About the Author: Alex Mitchell is the Lead Analyst for the Webs Marketing team. Find more from Alex on Google+.